Grand Duke Michael

The killing on 13 June 1918 of Grand Duke Michael, the brother to whom Nicholas II had wished to pass the throne, opened the final act of the Russian imperial family’s ill-fated drama in revolutionary Russia. Michael had been held in Perm, on the European side of the Urals (his brother was held on the Asian side, in Ekaterinburg). The revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion in May and increased White activity meant that both towns became riskily within the potential grasp of anti-Bolshevik and pro-imperial forces.

The book from which this portrait of Grand Duke Michael comes is the 1928 French translation of an account written in 1919 of the murder of various members of the imperial family in four locations. In July 1918, Ekaterinburg and the nearby town of Alapaevsk would see the murders of Nicholas II and many of his relatives, while the remaining grand dukes still held in Russia would be killed in Petrograd in January 1919.